No more Content Aggregation – let’s do Content Curation to bring value to readers along with search engine position

Content Aggregation (which is just a fancy term for the automated gathering of links and content from the web) can be viewed on sites like Google News and several other news kind of websites. Generally, this kind of aggregation may be seen being a good thing for content creators and content publishers and uptill recently, it was upto the technology to do this – meaning – automated scripts or bots – that could help fill up content from different sources. The part of content creation was and has generally been a very human effort.

But all this is now changing with Content Curation — what is content curation? – It is the act of human editors adding their work to the computer programs that gather, collate, organize and filter content.

An wonderful blog post about “content curation” is found on Robin Good’s weblog –  . You absolutely need to read this. It’s a guest post by Rohit Bhargava, the author of an brilliant book called “Personality Not Included”.

Here’s a part from Robin’s blog

“A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But this is far more than just a human-powered filter – like a Wikipedia or related human based content aggregation service. “Curation comes up when people realize that the world is no longer only about information seeking, it is also (now) about synchronizing communities together.”

One of the reasons that human curation is so very critical is simply because of the vast amount of people who’re now making and sharing media. “Everyone today is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complex – rather it’s quite simple. It means that we can all put things out in the public view now.”

So who are these content curators? What can they gather and re-publish? Do they have the right to get paid for curation? If so, who’s adding the real value, the content makers or the curators/publishers?

According to Dr. Peter Spaepen,

“If you are a blogger and want to put good content out there for your readers – your job should be to be the “content curator” – nothing more. You don’t have to write your own opinion and you don’t have to put a lot of time in writing a post. It’s not supposed to win a Pulitzer Price. Your only goal is to get the “market news” on your blog and get it indexed by Google.”

These questions are still being answered by the community but for now, let’s deal with how you can use 5 great wordpress plugins to bring content curation to your own blogs – these are all wordpress plugins and all of them are free so there is no reason not to try them – if you try one or more of these, leave me a comment and let me know what you think of these tools.

Continue reading this “5 Content Curation (content enhancement) WordPress Plugins” »

In all of my years of experience with wordpress plugins, I find the following 20 plugins to be the best for good search engine optimization. Please note that some of them are paid while others are free but I do not get paid for any of them if you buy them (as I feel that will make this review non-objective).

So let’s start with the 20 best SEO plugins for wordpress

#1: SEO Booster Pro

SEO Booster PRO is a really awesome powerful search engine optimization Plugin for WordPress that automates your blog by tracking, analyzing and utilizing the incoming searches from the various search engines. SEO Booster PRO auto-magically tracks your inbound site visitors from Google, researches the current ranking of the keyword, and then starts promoting the best suited keywords, after installation, you don’t need to do anything else. Just install and watch your search positions rise!!

SEO Booster Pro - Top WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO Booster Pro Homepage

#2: SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links offers automated SEO advantages for your site in addition to custom made keyword lists, nofollow plus much more. SEO Smart Links could instantly link keywords and phrases in your blogposts and comments with related posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Additionally SEO Smart linkspermits you to configure and set up keywords and set of matching URLs. Ultimately SEO Smart links enables you to set nofollow attribute and open these links in a new window. Almost everything happens totally transparent, and you could edit the options from your admin console panel. SEO Smart links is ideal for cross linking your content and is an example of how you can do cost effective seo by yourself.

SEO Smart Links - Top SEO WordPress Plugin

SEO Smart Links Homepage

#3: WP SEO Sniper

With SEO Sniper, you can do the following:

WP SEO Sniper - Top WordPress SEO plugin

WP SEO Sniper Homepage – This plugin has been discontinued for some strange reason but the current plugin can still be downloaded and used without problems.

#4: SEO Title Tag

Important Features of the SEO Title Tag plugin

• You could easily define custom titles for your post, a page, your Categories and Tags or any other URL that you specify like an author archive etc.
• You could set a custom slugs for a post or a page,
• This plugin will automatically put your blog’s name at the end of the title tag (instead of the beginning of the title) hence the most critical keywords are visible earlier
• You could specify your custom post title a  new post or in the edit post admin pages
• You could define a custom title for any of the 404 error pages too
• There is a way to mass edit titles and slugs thereby giving you a page that has good on-page search engine optimization on it

SEO Title Tags - WordPress SEO Plugin

SEO Title Tag Homepage

#5:Platinum SEO

This plugin is a an essential plugin to optimize your post and page titles for search engines – this makes it really easy to do search engine optimization on your pages.

It will generate all SEO relevant META tags automatically and helps you avoid duplicate content

This plugin will also allow you to override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page

This one is compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others plugins – but you may have to disable All in One SEO pack

You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not happy with the current permalink, you can change it through Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, and not have to worry about loss of Page rank or the Google penalty. The Platinum SEO plugin takes care of sending out a 301 redirect to the new location. It is a an essential feature and is not present in All in one SEO

The plugin also helps you add meta description and meta keywords tags to the  Categories and Tag pages.

Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page.These options are not available in All in one SEO Pack.

Platinum SEO Pack - Top WordPress SEO plugin

Platinum SEO Homepage

Continue reading this “Top 20 SEO plugins for WordPress” »